Game Details

The Skyranger lunged at the subway platform in Delhi, India. Thrusters vectoring down on their gimbals, the big tires taking the impact on thick shocks. The fireteam burst from the landing ramp into the dark and the rain, with Assaulter Edwin “Geronimo” Garcia up front. They saw blood, a fine mist of it along the stairs, a small pool on the landing. The way it reflected the light, you could tell it was fresh. A paper bag blew along the ground as my men slowly tucked into hard cover behind the railway signage. I strained to hear our quarry in the night.

We were not alone. A tall, thin man with round glasses stepped from the shadows across the track. And then came his twin—and his triplicate. Another pair of clones beside a commuter bench were illuminated by a flash of lightning. And then our world was lit green by plasma fire coming from all directions. Kim “Steady” Check, our heavy gunner, set one of the clones inside her holographic sights. The rest of the team had a solid target now and let loose volleys of their own. Metal wilted around my team, chips of concrete flew, but they kept firing into the night.

Consider the audacity of Firaxis Games’ Jake Solomon. It’s all fine and good to praise X-Com: Enemy Unknown as one of the finest PC games ever made. But to remake it? Many have tried to modernize the game and failed, including series originator Julian Gallop himself. Perhaps the most successful games to follow in X-Com’s turn-based tactical footsteps were Valkyria Chronicles and Frozen Synapse, but they never dared to tie combat to base building and a tech tree. Solomon’s team went for it, and just to make it harder on themselves, they tacked on the added goal of broadening the game’s audience to include console gamers.

They straight up nailed it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown puts you in control of the eponymous paramilitary organization, tasked with defending the earth from an alien menace. You will take the field in small, tactical engagements fought from an isometric perspective with soldiers that grow unique abilities over time. You will return to your base with fantastic treasures in the form of alien technology, then research your way into driving the alien scum from Earth once and for all. You will have to patiently build an underground base, relentlessly recruit talented engineers and scientists, all while keeping the population of the planet safe and at ease with the growing threat of abduction and xeno-terrorism. These are the same spinning plates found in the classic 1994 game of the same name, and the tensions and the traumas feel very much the same here.

The drama in the new XCOM is not found in managing your logistics to make sure you have enough ammunition day-to-day, but in the last-minute reload under fire, the desperate grenade hurled at a hidden enemy, the rear-guard action that saves your team but costs your best soldier her life. These dramas were in the original X-Com if you took care to look for them, but in this remake they come often and organically to the player.

Firaxis has taken the decision-making process that made the original so addictive and expanded on it, creating a play experience that's much more detailed than the original’s endless bug hunts. Limited cash flow can force choices between research in weapons you can’t afford to produce and research in life-saving armor you don’t have the supplies to build. You will need to go to desperate lengths to capture live aliens, take ludicrous risks to prevent civilian casualties, and charge into the teeth of withering gunfire to defuse deadly bombs. The developers obviously cared enough about the X-Com lineage to put their own mark on it, and their concern shows in every aspect of the game.

Calling the game accessible is not the same as calling the game easy. In fact, the Classic mode is quite challenging. In my first “terror” mission, against an assault by Chryssalids (fast Alien-type razor-clawed parasites), I saw my entire squad wiped out as they desperately retreated to the spawn point. Nearly a dozen hours spent building up those virtual men and women were rendered moot in moments. It was heartbreaking—and true to the original X-Com. Now that I’ve put 20+ more hours into Normal mode, I’m more comfortable with the system and ready to tackle Classic mode again.

Tragically, the game seems like it was not optimized for the keyboard and mouse. Clicking on the interface feels finicky, and the hotkeys keep moving around on you as you play. Overwatch—an action that tells your soldiers to fire during the alien’s turn, and perhaps the most-pressed key during any engagement—shifts between four different keys depending on who you’re controlling, but always remains on the Y button when using an Xbox 360 controller. Likewise, the zoom key is easier to reach on the controller (left trigger) than on the keyboard (‘G’? Really?).

And you’ll need to zoom quite a bit, because the game's camera is not perfect. It feels like Firaxis shot a movie with the wrong lens on. You can hardly see what’s going on at times because the overall view is too narrow, and zooming back from the action during your planning phase is required to plot your advance. The zoom is especially tight on the death animations. Instead of an artful pirouette, you’re often treated to little more than a gibbous splash and an alien limb flailing out of frame. It feels as though the developers were a bit ashamed of the size of their compact maps and tried to hide the issue with a narrow field of view.

But the maps are laid out well, and each of the 70 hand-made scenarios tells a story—a high-rise rooftop under construction in Tokyo with exposed scaffolds and tarps blowing in the wind, a paper company in London with the portrait of the CEO in the lobby, a burned out forest in a cold Russian swamp.

Aside from the camera, the game's presentation is larded with a luxury that strategy gamers will be largely unaccustomed to, reflected in everything from the detailed environments and beautiful art to the engrossing sound design. (The game looks a bit too much like a Gears of War tactics game with a bit of Mass Effect thrown in for my tastes—perhaps an artifact of the Unreal engine it’s based on.)

This remake is also notable for the sheer variety available in both gameplay and visual design. Missions vary from investigating traditional UFO crash sites to bomb defusing missions and VIP escorts. The game will reward multiple playthroughs.

In the end, this is not the X-Com that everyone was expecting. It’s more. It’s better. If you’re merely looking for a highly competent re-skin of the original X-Com, keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming Xenonauts from fledgling developer Goldhawk Interactive. This XCOM: Enemy Unknown stands apart from the original in its presentation, but it shares a common, classic soul.

The Good:

Snappy, immersive tactical gameplay replaces the slog genre veterans are used to

Love for the universe’s lore—the game has respectful fan-service in spades

These dramas were in the original X-Com if you took care to look for them, but in this remake they come often and organically to the player. Firaxis has taken the decision-making process that made the original so addictive and expanded on it, creating a play experience that's much more detailed than the original’s endless bug hunts.

The PC controls not being well rounded is very worrying. Considering this is a remake of a PC game, ignoring the PC when working with controls is worrying. Hearing suggestions about using a controller on a PC is infuriating.

Not that the suggestion itself is bad. But that the suggestion has to be made in the first place. A PC game should always be designed around PC controls. Its not that hard. Developers have only been doing that for the last 30 years.

I hope its merely "quirky" and not bad. I pre-ordered the game and its already shipping from Amazon. And even if bad, lets hope Firaxis can expend some effort to fix it.

The PC controls not being well rounded is very worrying. Considering this is a remake of a PC game, ignoring the PC when working with controls is worrying. Hearing suggestions about using a controller on a PC is infuriating.

Not that the suggestion itself is bad. But that the suggestion has to be made in the first place. A PC game should always be designed around PC controls. Its not that hard. Developers have only been doing that for the last 30 years.

I hope its merely "quirky" and not bad. I pre-ordered the game and its already shipping from Amazon. And even if bad, lets hope Firaxis can expend some effort to fix it.

Just because it started as a pc game, doesn't mean it has to be the main platform forever. Things move on so should you.

So the PC version is a crappy console port. Wish I hadn't preordered now.

I played the demo; the controls were definitely a bit wonky but the core game was strong enough that it was nothing more than a nuisance. I think "crappy" is definitely overstating it.

The only control issues I noticed in the demo were sometimes it didn't seem to register clicking the soldier sometimes (probably an isometric issue - click feet not head?) and the reordering of abilities. Neither made it any less fun to me.

I haven't tried the demo, so my opinion is only based on what I've read and videos I've seen, but it seems like they have created something entirely different than the original games. I have spent some time thinking about it and the best way I can express it is to say that the original was essentially a "simulation", while the new one is firmly a "game".

For me, the most enjoyable experiences in the original were the result of emergent behavior that developed organically due to its (relatively) detailed simulation. I can understand that some people dislike the excessive complexity and detail (managing ammo, searching maps), but I found that it added a great deal of immersion.

My brother is also a huge fan of the original and we have been following the new game with doubt and pessimism. He started playing the demo and we joked about what features were likely to be cut. An obvious one to consider was friendly fire, especially given the tiny squad sizes in the new game. Would the game let you shoot your own guys, as the original was happily willing to do? My prediction was that your soldiers would refuse, saying something like "No way man! I won't shoot my bro!"

When my brother attempted it, the result completely floored us. Attempting to fire a gun with no aliens around, he was simply given a "no valid target" message. Whereas the original game allowed you to fire at any spot with a line of fire, then simulated a straight bullet trajectory, the new game has a canned "fire at valid target" system. My understanding is that the new system completely eliminates the possibility of hitting nearby targets accidentally, as when two aliens stand near each other, and of course friendly fire is out. Apparently explosives can be "freely targeted", but their use seems to be limited.

This is just one example. The same design decision results in things like classes, loss of an inventory (!), a single base chosen by continent, the "glam cam" etc. A lot of people seem to like the streamlining, and claim that the soul of X-COM remains intact, but everything I've seen suggests that the soul has been carefully removed. The result appears to be a caricature of the original game. I suppose it just shows that people enjoyed the original for different reasons.

It might still be a fun game! It is entirely possible that the new game is in fact more tactically deep, with more meaningful choices, than the original. I just wish they hadn't called it XCOM.

Actually, the new game appears more similar to a Strategy RPG (like Final Fantasy Tactics) than the original game. The same was true of Rebelstar. I wonder if that is the genre the developers were targeting all along (the market is certainly larger).

I definitely appreciate the author's mention of an alternative, Xenonauts. I also find that Dwarf Fortress has a philosophy similar to (the original) X-COM, despite the huge difference in scope.

I am the only person completely disappointed by this remake? While I understand why they simplified the game for the sake of expanding the audience, one of the most enjoyable things about the original was the sheer amount of customization aspects to the game. Detailed agent load-out, randomized maps, large squads; all these made gave the game huge amounts of replay-ability. The demo as if they took the concept of the original game and moved the player along a single guiding rail.

Charlie apparently wants to write bad shared universe fiction instead of reviews (what's up with those first two painfully overwrought paragraphs?).

It's called flavor text. It's an introduction designed to give you a taste of the game's atmosphere, and it was well written. He even differentiated it via italics so that you can skip it if you'd like. If that's the only thing the noobreader can whine about, this is clearly a hell of a review.

And that said, it is. The game is given an overwhelmingly positive assessment, yet technical flaws are cited and discussed objectively. The review was written by someone who's actually familiar with the series (Hallelujah! OT is learning from its mistakes!) and game quality is thus given meaningful context. The author even goes so far as to reference AND link other relevant titles. Holy shit.

So the PC version is a crappy console port. Wish I hadn't preordered now.

You are obviously unfamiliar with how bad console-centric PC ports can be. Consider, RAGE, which was passably good on consoles while stuttering along like a motherbitch on PC. Consider Darksiders 2, which had limited video adjustment settings. How about DMC 4? The keyboard-mouse controls on that were so bad the game was impossible to play.How about Halo and Halo 2, coming out years after the console versions? Or Shoot Many Robots, which dropped local multi-player co-op (inferentially to sell more copies)?

If you're a PC gamer, there really is no good goddamn reason for you to not have an XBOX360 controller laying around (I own 0 XBOX and 3 controllers). That the experience is not keyboard-optimized (in the reviewer's opinion) is definitely a black mark against the developer, but not "crappy console port"-bad.

I'm expecting (hoping) that the mod scene steps up and adds back some of the features that didn't make it into the final game, like free aiming (so your plasma rifle equipped soldier can blow away the light cover that you just know that bastard alien is hiding behind) and maybe tweak the keyboard/mouse controls to be a little less clunky.

C'moooooon, Charlie! Why do you have to post this within 12 hours of release? You're killin' me, man. I have the pre-order sitting there, loaded on Steam and everything, taunting me.

Seriously. It is killing me to wait. It is all ready to go on Steam.

I'm a bit annoyed that a game that screams to be using a mouse has shit mouse and keyboard controls, but ancient out of date consoles dragging the entire industry into their time warp is, sadly, nothing new. You just smile and bare with it. Eventually those jerks will release modern hardware. It won't fix the controls, but at least my 3 year old computer might break a sweat when playing the latest port.

Any word on modability? Skyrim's criminally bad interface was in large part saved by the modding community. Maybe XCOM could receive similar treatment?

I was originally dismayed to hear about the changes and simplifications that Solomon’s team was making, but then I fired up the original game and thought hard about the reported changes. I think they’ll actually work for me.

Time units… I spend so much time thinking about them that I end up focusing on each of my soldiers individually instead of seeing the bigger picture. I can see myself doing better with squad tactics if I’m not counting TU. Similar story with the number of squaddies. Six feels too low, but 12+ never made the game better. It just allowed for a lot of mistakes.

I’m more nervous about targeting. I always liked taking shots into the dark where I suspected an alien was hiding. I don’t care if a lot of terrain isn’t destructible… I want to call the shots, so to speak. But if it’s not the way I like it, it won’t be a big deal.

The original has had over two decades to make its indelible impression on our geek minds. Without being an outright clone with new graphics, the purists will always be disappointed.

I played through the demo several times. It's very different, but also very similar. Overall, I had a lot of fun with it. That, combined with the positive reviews that are pouring in, makes me think this is going to be a winner.

The original still has a place on my hard drive, and I'm sure that I will continue to revisit it. But I also hope that this reboot does very well, and that Fireaxis continues to revisit this universe and keep refining the game and the genre.

Time units… I spend so much time thinking about them that I end up focusing on each of my soldiers individually instead of seeing the bigger picture. I can see myself doing better with squad tactics if I’m not counting TU. Similar story with the number of squaddies. Six feels too low, but 12+ never made the game better. It just allowed for a lot of mistakes.

Too many soldiers on the field made away missions feel a bit unwieldy. I usually had half my team doing recon, and the rest trying to outflank aliens I knew about. Plus, running my soldiers all over the map built up their strength and endurance.

If the demo is any indication, the maps will be a little more manageable, reducing the need for so much recon work (the "bug hunt," I suppose)

For me, the most enjoyable experiences in the original were the result of emergent behavior that developed organically due to its (relatively) detailed simulation. I can understand that some people dislike the excessive complexity and detail (managing ammo, searching maps), but I found that it added a great deal of immersion.

this while I will miss it, isn't essential to my experience of xcom, tho it does change some of the feeling of the game.

Quote:

Would the game let you shoot your own guys, as the original was happily willing to do? My prediction was that your soldiers would refuse, saying something like "No way man! I won't shoot my bro!"

AH now we talking about something that definitely changes the game. friendly fire accidents and the need to try and figure out how to save a valued cannon fodder member of your team, while still frying the aliens, was something I utterly enjoyed. This does fundamentally change the game experience in my opinion.

If you're a PC gamer, there really is no good goddamn reason for you to not have an XBOX360 controller laying around (I own 0 XBOX and 3 controllers). That the experience is not keyboard-optimized (in the reviewer's opinion) is definitely a black mark against the developer, but not "crappy console port"-bad.

When the controller has better support than the keyboard, that is one of the worst sins possible in a PC game. Bad graphics or broken gameplay just means its a shitty game. You reach shitty console port territory when PC specific features are broken.

Resident Evil 4 is one of the best in the series. Doesn't change the fact that the PC version was a shitty console port.

But just because they fucked up the port doesn't make the game itself bad. It just makes the PC side difficult. Some can be adapted, some cannot. I am irritated with what I am hearing about the controls in X-COM, but I am still looking forward to playing the game. I make it a challenge to fix or adapt around messed up controls without resorting to the controller. Some fixes are a five minute Google search. Some fixes require waiting years.

The PC controls not being well rounded is very worrying. Considering this is a remake of a PC game, ignoring the PC when working with controls is worrying. Hearing suggestions about using a controller on a PC is infuriating.

Not that the suggestion itself is bad. But that the suggestion has to be made in the first place. A PC game should always be designed around PC controls. Its not that hard. Developers have only been doing that for the last 30 years.

I hope its merely "quirky" and not bad. I pre-ordered the game and its already shipping from Amazon. And even if bad, lets hope Firaxis can expend some effort to fix it.

thank you. agree 100% with you. if I want to have a console, I would have a console. for me, while traveling, the idea of having a PC console controller, (or for that matter in a coffee shop), with me is just a non starter.

For me, the most enjoyable experiences in the original were the result of emergent behavior that developed organically due to its (relatively) detailed simulation. I can understand that some people dislike the excessive complexity and detail (managing ammo, searching maps), but I found that it added a great deal of immersion.

this while I will miss it, isn't essential to my experience of xcom, tho it does change some of the feeling of the game.

Quote:

Would the game let you shoot your own guys, as the original was happily willing to do? My prediction was that your soldiers would refuse, saying something like "No way man! I won't shoot my bro!"

AH now we talking about something that definitely changes the game. friendly fire accidents and the need to try and figure out how to save a valued cannon fodder member of your team, while still frying the aliens, was something I utterly enjoyed. This does fundamentally change the game experience in my opinion.

It doesn't sound like it's a friendly fire accident that's been removed but directly targeting your own team. Seems more like a "crap I didn't mean to click there" UI change that's been stopped. I haven't played enough of it (and it didn't come up in the demo) to know if you can miss an alien and hit your own guy. If they removed that then I agree that something is wrong, but it still won't stop me from enjoying the game. There so much more that they've done right, from what I've seen of the demo, to let little things ruin it for me.

Gotta love all the people in this thread judging the game before they even get their hands on it. It's everywhere else on the internet too, bunch of purists who point-of-fact cannot have the ability to know what they're talking about; namely because neither they nor any other part of the general public have even seen a physical box of the game. Don't judge a game by its demo (which we all agree sucked) and reserve judgement until you've actually played it. I'd think you'd at the very least be appreciative of a game bringing a genre you like to popular attention in AAA form. But apparently people love to make mountains out of mole hills and rape their own childhoods with them or something.

For my part, I'm going to be checking steam tomorrow like a kid begging his parents to let him start opening Christmas presents.

Gotta love all the people in this thread judging the game before they even get their hands on it. It's everywhere else on the internet too, bunch of purists who point-of-fact cannot have the ability to know what they're talking about; namely because neither they nor any other part of the general public have even seen a physical box of the game. Don't judge a game by its demo (which we all agree sucked) and reserve judgement until you've actually played it. I'd think you'd at the very least be appreciative of a game bringing a genre you like to popular attention in AAA form. But apparently people love to make mountains out of mole hills and rape their own childhoods with them or something.

For my part, I'm going to be checking steam tomorrow like a kid begging his parents to let him start opening Christmas presents.

I am judging a part of the game, but also reserving full judgement until I have played it. I am not a "purist". I have been looking forward to this game for some time. I quite enjoyed the little taste the Demo gave on playing the game.

So you make a mass accusation that everyone judging the game is a purist. Then you make a mass assumption that everyone thought the Demo was crap. Want to try three for three?

The PC controls not being well rounded is very worrying. Considering this is a remake of a PC game, ignoring the PC when working with controls is worrying. Hearing suggestions about using a controller on a PC is infuriating.

A PC game should always be designed around PC controls. Its not that hard. Developers have only been doing that for the last 30 years.

The problem that developers with limited time have to deal with is that it's harder to port PC-focused controls to a console than the other way around.

It sucks that they often don't have the resources for multiple teams dedicated to working on the different platform versions, but it's a fact of life.

I don't like using a controller on my PC, but I suppose I'd rather have a version with less than perfect controls than no version at all. Not sure everyone would feel that way though.

Excellent news, this is one of the few 'reimagened' games from a beloved franchise that I actually preordered. My hopes for the gaming industry has actually been going up lately with awesome remakes of Mechwarrior, Tribes and Deus Ex; which is crazy because the last decade has been horrible for gaming.

I can't wait to play it later tonight, I spent so many hours in middle school playing the original and Terror from the Deep.

Gotta love all the people in this thread judging the game before they even get their hands on it. It's everywhere else on the internet too, bunch of purists who point-of-fact cannot have the ability to know what they're talking about; namely because neither they nor any other part of the general public have even seen a physical box of the game. Don't judge a game by its demo (which we all agree sucked) and reserve judgement until you've actually played it. I'd think you'd at the very least be appreciative of a game bringing a genre you like to popular attention in AAA form. But apparently people love to make mountains out of mole hills and rape their own childhoods with them or something.

For my part, I'm going to be checking steam tomorrow like a kid begging his parents to let him start opening Christmas presents.

I am judging a part of the game, but also reserving full judgement until I have played it. I am not a "purist". I have been looking forward to this game for some time. I quite enjoyed the little taste the Demo gave on playing the game. I expected more gameplay and more challenge.

So you make a mass accusation that everyone judging the game is a purist. Then you make a mass assumption that everyone thought the Demo was crap. Want to try three for three?

Just relaying what I've seen across the boundless internets. There are exceptions to every rule, congratuations. You're special. I can say you're the first person (of ~30) I've talked to about the demo that actually enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong it wasn't horrible, but it did a pretty crappy job of "demoing" anything beyond the basic gameplay IMO.

I know I'm alone on this, but I didn't like the original X-COM. This line sums it up for me:

"Nearly a dozen hours spent building up those virtual men and women were rendered moot in moments."

I'm not being snippy, I'm asking genuinely: How is that fun?

When I play games, I frequently save because of stuff like this.

XCom was one of the few games that I would just "suck it up" and accept the loss (as long as it wasn't catastrophic, like losing the whole team) Why? Because its the way the game was meant to be played. Reloading after a death felt too much like cheating. It's like playing on "Easy" mode.